| Title | The golden age of horror: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later (2003/2007) |
| Author | Chris Hornbostel and Jason McMaster |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | October 9, 2014 |
Chris: I've found that folks love to talk about 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later. That makes sense. Those two movies played a large part in helping put put zombie culture at the forefront of 21st century horror..
Read the full articleI am loving this feature. You guys are doing such great stuff here. This is a welcome diversion.
That picture of Robert Carlyle running across the field is one of my favorite frames.
Thanks so much.
Great works, guys. Although I hate to tell you this, but Danny Boyle directed the opening sequence of 28 Weeks Later. Which is arguably the finest 15 minutes of zombie movie ever made. I can think of no other sequence that achieves, in the context of zombie mythology, as much as that opening.
Amen to that.
Nice! I was telling Chris, I need to revisit the sequel. I only saw it once back when it came out and I remember feeling rather indifferent towards it. I'm eager to give it another look, especially with that info about the directing!
Crap. I go and call out that sequence for being great and stuff....and it's not even the credited director's bit. Oh well. It is everything you say it is, and more. Just phenomenal.
First time I saw 28 Weeks was two days ago. As Don is running for his life there, one thing about the infected stuck out in my mind: "He's going to get tired out and stop running before they will." That's an amazing new wrinkle in the zombie mythos, I think.
Here's something that I realized after I let 28 Weeks settle a bit, and it made me wonder if Garland/Boyle had planned for sequels all along.
One of the unique characteristics of zombies in this mythology is that the rage virus takes a person from normal to monster in 20 seconds or so. That's what we learn in 28 Days Later. I thought that was a curious thing, personally. I wondered why they wrote it that way. I mean...in Dawn Of The Dead we see the goodguy get bit and infected, and he gets sick for at least a day or two before he dies and turns.
With 28 Weeks Later, we see why that's important. The virus has been contained to only the island of Great Britain. If the rage infection had a longer incubation period, it would be possible for someone who was infected to get on a chunnel train, hop a plane perhaps, or even just take a boat across the channel and the disease vectors off the island and onto the continent. That's not possible with the 20-seconds to monster aspect of the disease, though. that setup in the first movie makes the second film's plot possible.
Hey dudes, I apologize in advance because I'm going to be That Guy. Here's the thing: 28 Days/Weeks Later are both great movies that I enjoy immensely. But they are not zombie movies. And it's got nothing to do with ambulatory speed, who gives a shit about that.
No, these are outbreak movies. Which might sound like splitting hairs, except that it's missing what I believe is a pretty critical aspect of the best zombie movies: an existential element. With 28 Days Later and its sequel, we've got a defined medical crisis which results in people coming down with specific symptoms and vectors of transmission. But there's two problems: one, you pointed out yourself Chris, it's got a really short fuse. You're pretty much a zero to sixty monster once infected. And second, the virus dies with its carrier. Do infected people eat? We don't see them do this, which I suppose is why we have piles of dead bodies at the end of the first movie. Which, incidentally, makes me curious how you get from there to the hordes of infected in the sequel, but I can overlook it for the sake of the sequel's story.
With many zombie movies, including Romero's and the Walking Dead, everyone is already infected, you just don't show symptoms until death. At that point you have the opportunity to, as John Leguizamo's character put it in Land of the Dead, see how the other half live. And everyone does, unless they die of sufficient brain trauma. And that little detail changes everything, in my opinion. You don't wait them out or rebuild society as it was. You live with it, to the extent that that's possible. And that's a zombie movie. Partly, as Jason points out, recognition of inevitable death, but partly understanding that death isn't the end, and the afterlife is a bitch.
It's a zombie movie. The infected turn to monsters and attack the uninfected and kill them or turn them.
That's unnecessarily reductive. You could say the same thing about vampire or werewolf movies.
Sorry to be That Other Guy, but the virus does not die with its carrier. Hence...
"Hannah, I love you very much...keep away from me."
And Pogue! No existential element? What?
As to the first point, I probably didn't put across the meaning I intended. You're right, the crow had a corpse's blood that dripped into the guy's eye and infected him. Let me take a mulligan - the virus has an extremely narrow path to new victims. You could essentially find a safe place, hole up and pretty much wait it out. Basically what Brendan Gleeson and his daughter were doing before the others showed up.
As to the second, well yeah. Not to say that it's not horrific to see those you love turn into murderous, mindless beasts, but I imagine the horror would be along the scale of seeing your loved ones die of ebola. Except that ebola victims don't try to kill everyone.
Incidentally, I would be very interested to know how long the rage virus can survive in open air, or on a bird's beak, because that's the kind of geek I am. But of course the correct answer is "as long as the script needs it to."
How long it survives in open air is immaterial. It can only be communicated through the transfer of bodily fluids (blood and saliva). So I guess the answer to your bird's beak question would be, as long as the fluid is a fluid.
If blood dries, and then is later reconstituted a la the African lungfish...well...all bets are off. If they haven't yet figured out what happens in 28 Years Later, done and done.
As much as your "as long as the script needs it to be" made me smile, I think the rules are pretty clear as far as virus transmission is concerned.
There's this great bit in the special features where they describe this early idea of doing a blood transfusion to save Frank. A complete blood transfusion. But then they realized that was ridiculous and impossible. So they abandoned it.
Immaterial to the movie, sure. Not immaterial to me. Certain anaerobic viruses just can't survive contact with oxygen. The rage virus clearly can. How long? Just the kind of things I think about.
Anaerobic? Okay Pogue. Now you're just making up words.
What a scrabulous thing to say. I am absolutely blortified.
" If you haven’t seen The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later, they both begin with the main character coming out of a coma in an empty hospital."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Just saying...
Both of these suckers are amazing films. I remember going to see 28 days later in a packed theatre opening weekend after reading in the paper that the director of Trainspotting made a freaking zombie movie that was knocking people's socks off. That scene where Jim sets off the car alarm...holy shit, I thought my heart stopped for a second. I felt a very visceral fear, and the entire audience freaked the fuck out. And then everyone laughed. And then Jim went into the church....and after that, the theatre was pretty much the most tense place I'd ever been in....
I think it's hard to really convey how frightening those zombies were back when 28 days later came out. No one had ever seen anything like them before. Just the speed and ferocity and sheer crazed violence of them. The twitching, and growling, and head shaking. The blood vomit. The end is extremely fucking nigh indeed.
And 28 days later is so, well, beautiful. There are so many amazing shots...I mean, I could go on forever about it.
One more time-capsuley thing. I was living in New York City when this film came out, and there was a lot of criticism thrown at the film regarding the beginning scenes of deserted London, specifically the sequence where Jim is looking over all the posts, and pictures, and notes to loved ones at Piccadilly Circus. In the weeks following 9/11 the same kind of thing was happening all over Manhattan, in parks, in subway stations, all over. People posting up notes and pictures, to people who were still lost, or in remembrance. Lots of people thought it had no business showing up in a zombie movie. Boyle later said the film was shot prior to 9/11, and had no way of knowing the kind of impact it would have.
Personally, and I can also speak for everyone I was friends with at the time, it felt totally appropriate. This whole shared catastrophe was new to all of us, and seeing it carried over into a movie like 28 days later..., I mean, it really hit us hard. Those shots, and the whole global pandemic theme, really elevated the material, and spoke to something deep inside my post 9/11 head/heart.
Is this the first real deal horror movie (or any movie) that dealt with the ruin leftover after 9/11? For me, hell yes.
